RSS FeedIt was great that the third and last Vino Valencia event to take place at The Ginger Loft (the number 1 Valencia restaurant in tripadvisor at the time of writing) should be the busiest and buzziest yet. Next month we move we move on to another restaurant in central Valencia, but to have the first three here was a boon.
Three events isn’t many, I know, but you do get a bit of a sense of things – familiar faces, out and out loyalists who’ve been to all of them, people who have heard of it from someone who’s been, and in the case of our new friend Robert from Portland, someone who’s on holiday and happened to wander into The Ginger Loft last Sunday as we were tasting the wines and listening admiringly to Mike and Santi come up with just the right food pairings – matches that would never have crossed my mind.
Also, for the first event or two, the bodegas were a bit unsure what we were doing and I was asking of them. Now that there’s a bit of backstory, it’s easier to convey. Belén García-Cárceles from Aranleón and María José López Peidro from Chozas Carrascal added lustre, expertise and enthusiasm – a rare combination – to proceedings. Concha Rubio of Romeral Vinícola would have brought yet more to the party if she’d been able to make it. She was a model of efficiency in getting the wines to the restaurant in good time and good humour.
For the first two events we had a wine each from the three Denominaciones de Origen of the Comunitat Valenciana (Alicante, Valencia – their website will be working one day, I imagine – and Utiel-Requena), but this time we had three red wines from Utiel-Requena. First, a 2008 Shiraz from the Ardilla range of monovarietal wines from Romeral Vinícola. This is an excellent value (well, cheap as chips at around 3 euro plus VAT) range stressing straightforward varietal characteristics plus that Utiel-Requena je ne sais quoi. For UK readers there is the added delight that 2% of all sales revenue goes to a project devoted to the reintroduction of the red squirrel into Spain (Ardilla means squirrel).
Next came the Helix 2005, a very special limited edition wine only normally available to the Circle of Friends of the Bodega. A silky yet opulent blend of Cabernet Sauvignon (40%), Tempranillo (30%), Merlot (20%) and Utiel-Requena’s own Bobal (10%). Belén showed off not only this wine and a display bottle or two of the bodega’s other wines, but also the social skills she deploys as the public face of the bodega. Though she wasn’t so good at protecting the empanadas that guests are allowed one of – these ran out suspiciously early. She is busily developing the social networking side of Aranleón in LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.
The third wine was Las ocho 2006 from Chozas Carrascal. It has been Piet’s ambition to have this, a wine that really kindled his enthusiam for Valencian wines. As the name suggests, it is an ambitiously complex blend of eight varieties. María José, the owners’ daughter, was constantly surrounded by a throng of people hanging on her every word. At least I think it was what she was saying that had their attention.
Have a look at the photos. For those of you in the vicinity of Valencia, do register for the next one when the list opens in a week or two, for the rest, there’s always Twitter and the other social networking stuff.
Above all, gracias mil to everyone who took part.
